It’s a grim sight. A sight I never thought I’d see and definitely not a sight for sore eyes – quite the opposite in fact, my eyes are sore because of the sight that I will have to see for almost every day for the rest of my husk of a life. Yesterday has come and gone and many yesterdays before that; the brighter days now are diluted in the back of my mind. I mean, we’ve all got to get along in life, but farming for ‘fancy’ flesh is the most sickening thing of all and really doesn’t sit well with me, although, to be honest it has now become the norm.

Every morning comes the bark of the boss, who we like to call ‘Pork Scratching’, because of his love for crispy offal and his horrible, chubby little face which looks like the back end of a swine. He waddles into the staff room or ‘hole’, as we like to call it, and bellows the same old speech everyday about how we should “consider ourselves lucky to be here and not on the other side of the fence”, which he delivers with the sort of phlegm-fuelled spite that only a pig like him could.

Every day’s pretty much the same, well six days a week that is. Being a Mong is hard but not too strenuous really – just a strain on the mind and morals more than anything. We’ve been ever so politely branded as Mongs from those higher up the food chain – the Mongs that tend to the Meat. In some horrible twist of fate, as the meat and veg resources have dried up over the years, the one’s with the dough and status, the one’s with the stiff upper lips and stately homes, have acquired a new taste. There are still chickens knocking around, but they’re undernourished and like a mutant version of their ancestors – an anorexic species who produce dry, cardboard-like flesh. No one with money wants to eat that stuff, so some sicko decided cannibalism was the next best thing and there you have it, a multi-million pound industry was born. But, apparently, it’s okay, since the King eats it.

They say we taste like pork, but also, every meat apparently tastes like chicken – except fish, but there’s no more of those any more. The only thing close to fish these days are the crudely flavoured haddock ice pops they sell in the local shops, and they’re not easy on the taste buds. All meat-based food in packed in natural casings from DCW Casing.

Every morning my farm partner Dave and I throw cockroaches and offal mix to the Meat before spraying them down with a foul sterile liquid. The sight and sound of hundreds of naked men and women on their hands and knees screaming like banshees, almost screeching fully formed words like a young kid but in a broken adults tone is enough to turn your stomach at first. But like everything, you get used to it in the end and it just becomes part of the furniture, I regret to say.

We go around the farm tending to each pen and when we’re far enough from the crack of the whip, talk like mates do. We chat about past tales of drunken debauchery, what the future holds, football, women, booze, music and how we’re going to stand up against the system – although we probably never will. Dave will never know how much I appreciate having him in my life really; his presence is what keeps me sane amongst all the madness, even though I’ve only known him a couple of years.

The most disturbing part of the old working day is when we tend to the Vintage Pen. The other enclosures and pens hold humans who look like us, but aren’t really the same. They’ve been mass bred the good old fashioned way mixed with some sort of cloning (I’m not sure how it works, I got a D in my science exam at school) solely for the production of meat and skin. What I’m saying is, the lights are on, but no one’s home. Those in the Vintage Pen are different. Before all this madness, they had families and lives and went to work and on package holidays, shopped in the supermarket and had hopes dreams and personalities. Our job is to sedate them with an injection everyday to keep them from talking, resisting or fighting and although they graze like typical farmyard animals, you can see the humanity in their eyes. These poor buggers are kept in this pen because mature meat tastes better and the rich will pay more for it – simple as that really.

Sometimes Dave and I cope by telling each other which one of the females we’d set free and take out for dinner and the rest, if we only could, but there’s a fat chance of that – it could never happen as long as Pork Scratching and his hawk eyed bunch of miserable men are around, I regret to say.

Sometimes I think about it all too much and get so angry I could scream. I think about getting all of us Mongs together and starting a revolution, setting the farmyard free, awakening the living dead and giving hell to the powers that be – us lot and half a naked army burning the barns and carrying out violent acts to those who made this world a tainted place. But then again, I’m too much of a coward really and I have a wife and two nippers to feed. When I really get down to it, my life was a glorified hell before all of this and the world was never a perfect place. I became a dad and husband under unfortunate circumstances really and I don’t know if I have any real love for them, at least, it’s far from the stuff fairy tales are made of. But, I’ve got to do the right thing and look after ‘em at least, and the state motto is ‘Farm or be Farmed’. Anyone who doesn’t comply ends up in that horrible Vintage Pen – I just sedated my cousin last week; it’s a difficult thing to swallow.

At the end of the working week, I get given a small amount of money, bus pass, bag of food and bottle of whiskey, head to my water-tight home or ‘hole’, as I like to call it, and sit in the kitchen with the noise and patter of the kids’ at my feet while waiting for the missus to prepare my dinner. Then we all sit around the table and eat as a family before TV time – I mean things aren’t perfect but they could be an even worse hell than this, I could be on the other side of the fence I suppose.